Tag: Family

Being Adopted, Part II: Finding the Missing Pieces

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You can read the earlier posts in this series here:

Flowers around a pond at the Denver Botanical Gardens, September 2013

Happy Mother’s Day! I thought this day would be an appropriate time to revisit the topic of my adoption and my two mothers: the one who carried me and gave birth to me, and the one who raised me. After my first two posts on being adopted, I received some feedback that they painted adoption in an overly negative light. To the contrary, adoption is very often the best solution to incredibly difficult problems. The fact that it is an imperfect solution does not mean we should avoid it or that we shouldn’t relish the many joys it brings. I am grateful to both of my mothers for the choices they made and the role they played in my life. I would not have lived the life I have lived, and I would not be the person I am, had it not been for both of these women.

I had always been curious about my biological family. In my early adult years, I took some half-hearted steps toward finding them, like adding my name and birthdate to online registries. It wasn’t until I was 22 or 23, though, that I started really seeking information about them. Read more

Settling Into Equilibrium: Some Thoughts on Balance

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Ghost print, monotype, rumpled fabric

Finding balance in modern life is a topic written about with such frequency that I’ve begun to roll my eyes whenever I see a piece with the words “work-life balance” in the title. I hope you’ll indulge me as I again explore this topic about which so much has already been said. Like Sheryl Sandberg, I dislike the phrase “work-life balance” because it implies that work and life are separate and exclusive domains. To paraphrase Sandberg, who could ever feel good about work when it’s billed as the opposite of life?

Work is but one aspect of life, and it’s an important element. It helps to give meaning to life, to give us purpose, to keep us striving and feeling the thrill of accomplishments (in the best scenario, anyway). I am happiest when I’m industrious and can see the fruits of my labor. Someone once told me that they view life as a four-quadrant matrix made up of family and friendships, profession, health and fitness, and spirituality. At any given time, one of the quadrants may demand more of your attention than the others, but to live our best lives, we have to attend to all of them regularly. I picture the quadrants on the top of one of those toys that you can spin and push in any direction and it will always return to standing. Sometimes one quadrant will be up while another is down, and some teetering may happen, but the four areas will all eventually balance each other and keep the toy steady.

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Being Adopted, Part I: An Incomplete Self

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Charcoal drawing of a seated and smiling mother and child
Mother and Child, 2004.

I learned I was adopted when I was four years old. My parents didn’t mean to tell me yet, but someone else told me and I asked them about it. They did intend to tell me eventually, but I don’t know that they had decided when the perfect time would be.

Four was as good an age as any. The news wasn’t shocking or devastating. I understood the basic premise: my biological mother couldn’t care for me, and my birth parents couldn’t have children but wanted a child, so I became theirs. I thought it was kind of a cool story, something that made me special and different. As a four-year-old, I didn’t really have the emotional capacity to delve beneath the surface of this new information. Over the years, what it means to be adopted would gradually unfold, coloring all aspects of my life and personality. Thirty years later, I’m still learning how it affects me.

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Being Adopted, Introduction: The Primal Wound

- Alexis 2 Comments
Photo of a statue of a woman holding a child

I haven’t written about it much here, so you may not know that I was adopted as an infant. I’m usually surprised when I find out that someone in my life doesn’t know this about me, because it’s a pretty damn big part of my identity.

For 30 years now, I’ve known I was adopted, and my feelings about that fact as well as the importance I’ve placed on it have varied quite a bit throughout my life. At times, I’ve thought and talked about it a lot, and at other times, I’ve treated it like it was no big deal. But I’m beginning to realize, with the help of a therapist, just how big of a deal it really is.

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What I Learned from Tracking My Spending for a Month

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Close-up of twenty-dollar bills

As I wrote at the end of the year, one of my resolutions for 2019 was to get a better grasp on my finances by tracking in a detailed way all of my discretionary spending for the month of January. It was a little tricky to do because of the way my husband and I separate our accounts and divide our expenses, but I analyzed the data as best I could. It was an eye-opening experiment.

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